Epic announces $1 million Winter Royale Fortnite tournament

Epic Games has unveiled the Winter Royale Online Tournament, an open Fortnite competition which will have a prize pot of $1 million.

Announcing the news in a blog post, the Fortnite publisher explained that Winter Royale will pave the way for the Fortnite World Cup: “Starting later this month, we will hold a test event that will emulate the World Cup Qualification process. This will help us gather valuable learnings to better prepare for the process next year. The Solo test events will consist of two parts, the Winter Royale Qualifiers and the Winter Royale Finals, which will have a total of $1,000,000 in prizes up for grabs.

“There will be several chances for anyone to try and get a high score during the Winter Royale Qualifier days. The highest score you achieve during any event session will be the one that counts, so be sure to give it your all! As part of our ongoing competitive tests to prepare for the Fortnite World Cup, Winter Royale will use the same game settings as the currently available Pop-Up Cup. The top performers in each region for NA and EU will be verified, and those players found eligible will be invited to participate in the Winter Royale Finals for their region. While this tournament will be restricted to NA and EU, we’re planning on holding other region-specific tournaments in additional regions in the near future.”

The blog post also detailed some tweaks to Fortnite’s In-Game Tournament system: “In the v6.30 update, we made critical fixes to in-game tournament matchmaking and various other bugs to provide a more competitive experience. For example, we found that players’ point totals were not influencing their matchmaking at all. Now, players will be correctly matched against opponents with similar point totals. The deeper you advance in a tournament, the more challenging the matches will become.”

As far as Winter Royale is concerned, Epic Games said the (open to all-comers) qualifiers will take place on 24 and 25 November 2018, and the European Winter Royale finals will take place between 30 November 2018 and 1 December 2018, with the North American finals following on 11 to 12 December.

Epic added: “For specific times and a listing of all other online tournaments, be sure to follow the schedule in the In-game Events tab. Best of luck!”

Steve Boxer has been writing about videogames since the early 1990s. His first console was an Atari VCS, and he misspent most of his youth in the 1980s in the arcades. As well as for Green Man Gaming, he can be found writing for The Guardian, Empire, TechRadar and Pocket-Lint. He’s currently having trouble deciding whether his favourite console is his Xbox One X or his Switch, and plays a wide range of games, but especially RPGs (he loves a good JRPG) action-adventure titles, shooters of all descriptions and driving games. Follow him here.